New breed will be free from pesticide residue & giving 150% more per-hectare yield

The NDA government doesn’t seem to be immune to inter-ministerial wrangling, as Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently discovered during a meeting of all departments dealing with infrastructure.

Soil health cards to expand and Urea subsidy cut likely

Trinamul MP says party may be flexible after Modi overture

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Wednesday unveiled the roadmap for putting agriculture on high-growth trajectory with intensive use of technology in farming to scale up land productivity.

Keeping passenger fares and freight rates unchanged, railway minister Mallikarjuna Kharge announced the government’s intention to open the rail sector for foreign and domestic investment in his 101

The Centre’s current food subsidy burden stands at roughly Rs. 90,000 crores, which will shoot up to `1,10,000 crores if the proposed provisions of the Food Bill are implemented.

“We are expecting the ministry of rural development to wrap up their ongoing Socio-Economic and Caste Census (SECC) by the first quarter of the next year by which we expect to get the parliamentary nod for the Food Bill also. Thus, we will be in a position to roll out the legal foodgrain entitlement effectively based on fresh data on economic deprivation,” said a senior official.

After announcing the direct cash transfer rollout from January 1, the focus has come back on the Food Security Bill, for which the UPA government is looking at the Budget Session for passage. The parliamentary standing committee is learnt to have given its report to Lok Sabha Speaker Meira Kumar.

Along with direct cash transfer, the UPA is banking on the Food and Land Bills to yield the Congress rich dividends. “The standing committee report could be tabled in the Lok Sabha this week. The government will (then) move to the Cabinet with its final draft,” a senior official said.

Five years after the launch of Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) on which the Centre has spent over `1,10,700 crores so far, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will release a comprehensive review of the performance of the flagship scheme on Saturday.

The release of the review report is coming at a time when the job demands within MNREGA have seen more than 20 per cent decline in the last financial year, while a number of states could not spend their allocated funds under the flagship scheme.

After patting on the back by announcing that he would give one per cent of the annual budget of the ministry for rural development (`99,000 crores) to the ministry of panchayati raj, Union minister Jairam Ramesh is faced with reality check — that it is not he who can do so, but Parliament only.

A few weeks ago, Union minister for rural development Jairam Ramesh announced that one per cent of his ministry’s annual budget, which would come to about `990 crores, would be given to the panchayati raj ministry.